stella

{ tw; murder, suicide } They say dead men tell no tales. Samantha Hollis makes sure of that and can rewrite a suitable narrative if necessary. The dead tell her many things. She is a keeper of secrets, yet an unveiler of truths. Samantha has a duty to expose, and to hide, some of the secrets of Santa Cielo. It was like putting together a puzzle, but an ever-changing one. They weren’t just dead bodies, but stories of life; someone that lived, and it’s her job to tell it. Dead men tell no tales, but Dr. Hollis sure can. Samantha Jolene Hollis grew up in her father’s shadow. She was bookended by siblings on either side, but Sammy Jo refused to be a victim of middle child syndrome. The match of Samantha’s parents was one of convenience – they were both far too gone to love anyone else. She grew up in a town that held secrets tangled in the gnarled roots of old oak trees. Grudges were draped about like the moss shrouding ghostly, spindly branches that reached ever upwards; closer and closer to the One that would save their souls. It was a town that simply told you what you were – what you were allowed to be. Old money and debutante cotillions only prettied the package of Samantha’s upbringing, though it was far uglier than the family presented it to be. The members of the Hollis family could never walk the fine line of being too hard or too soft. Being too much or not enough. A soft heart couldn’t weather the storm of her upbringing, but Samantha did her best to buffer her younger sister from it all and gave her the option she never had – the option to remain gentle. The option to try. One had to embrace the chaos and the calamity or become buried beneath it all. She was born tangled in the toxicity, tension, and terror of her parents’ tumultuous tale, but Samantha still found herself adoring the more present of the two. Samantha learned her coping strategies from her father, and buried her nose in textbooks and earplugs in an attempt to block everything out when whiskey, motorcycles, or an afternoon at the shooting range wouldn’t screw her head back on quite right. She did her best to choke out her father’s temper and shed her mother’s passivity from herself. There was an ever-present need for control within the family, and Sam was the one pegged to rein it in. The night Samantha started manipulating facts began like many others. She was home from medical school, perched at her mother’s vanity. A delicate hand wrapped around a small, silver box. With a flick, the box slid open. Samantha extracted the last cigarette and maneuvered it between reddened lips. A hobnail lamp cast shadows as she peered at herself in her mirror. Reflected back was a young face emerging from the dark, with smoke curling up around it. She stubbed out her ashes into the vodka bottle her mother had just emptied. An older version of the same face loomed over her shoulder. The gun held to her mother’s temple was nothing new. Samantha had watched these hysterics far too many times before. She watched the reflection and fixed it with an icy stare, but Sam never expected her mother to actually pull the trigger. The shot went off. The body slumped. Her sister stormed in, followed shortly by their father. The screaming started, punctuated by tears and accusations. The gun was grabbed by the youngest Hollis and pointed at the patriarch. Samantha made a move to coax her sister down, but the extent that this toxicity had grown to in her absence struck her almost as hard as the bullet lodged into her side. A third shot brought down their father, and Samantha truly thought this was the end. There had to be a way to fix this – to contain and control it. She couldn’t lose her sister to a trial in the aftermath. Fading in and out of consciousness, her sister’s prints were wiped from the gun as the wailing of sirens grew closer. It was nestled back in her mother’s hand as the world went dark. Samantha awoke to plan a double funeral, and as the legal guardian to someone that she both resented and adored. Whiskey Lullabye was played at the wake, though a flask of it rarely left her side that day. Samantha did the best she could in the years since, and only allowed herself to unravel after her sister could stand on her own two feet. Samantha unraveled into the arms of someone she wished she didn’t during her residency, and the situation bloomed and twisted into something she could not get out from underneath. They dragged her kicking and screaming into the darkness, exposing her to things she wished to turn a blind eye to. She found her own way in the dark and ultimately into Santa Cielo. Sam was not proud to put a hit on someone, but she had bargained for some desperate breathing room. She owes a favor, but has never done enough to implicate her in a game she doesn’t want to play. The resurfacing of said person has Samantha backed into a corner, debating if two should play this game of chess… and whose body is in that damn grave.